I’m (just recently) having a problem with Plex, and I wanted to see if anyone else is having this problem too.
I’m pretty sure I just recently updated my Plex Media Server (PMS) to the latest-and-greatest… I’m not sure if my struggles can be directly correlated to that update, but until recently I had no problems at all with playing (mostly TV Series) DVR’d-and-commercially-edited Windows Media Center .wtv files.
All of my .MKV (mostly Blu Ray, some DVD) rips play perfectly, as they always have.
My .wtv recordings will still play on my NVidia Shield, when accessed via Kodi or SPMC. If I move the files out of my Plex folders and back into my “Recorded TV” folder, a WMC Extender (Ceton Echo, etc) will play them just fine too… if I just double-click on the files, my Win7 WMC PC fires up WMC and plays them. So I don’t think the files are corrupted.
But for whatever reason, Plex doesn’t seem to want to play .wtv files for me anymore. I’ve tried:
Plex Web Player
Plex app for NVidia Shield
Plex app on my Samsung Galaxy S5
Plex app for my Samsung Galaxy TabS
I can’t get any .wtv playback on any of them… and this has worked for me for many years now.
Anyone else experiencing this?
@psuKinger said:
I’m (just recently) having a problem with Plex, and I wanted to see if anyone else is having this problem too.
I’m pretty sure I just recently updated my Plex Media Server (PMS) to the latest-and-greatest… I’m not sure if my struggles can be directly correlated to that update, but until recently I had no problems at all with playing (mostly TV Series) DVR’d-and-commercially-edited Windows Media Center .wtv files.
All of my .MKV (mostly Blu Ray, some DVD) rips play perfectly, as they always have.
My .wtv recordings will still play on my NVidia Shield, when accessed via Kodi or SPMC. If I move the files out of my Plex folders and back into my “Recorded TV” folder, a WMC Extender (Ceton Echo, etc) will play them just fine too… if I just double-click on the files, my Win7 WMC PC fires up WMC and plays them. So I don’t think the files are corrupted.
But for whatever reason, Plex doesn’t seem to want to play .wtv files for me anymore. I’ve tried:
Plex Web Player
Plex app for NVidia Shield
Plex app on my Samsung Galaxy S5
Plex app for my Samsung Galaxy TabS
I can’t get any .wtv playback on any of them… and this has worked for me for many years now.
Anyone else experiencing this?
What are you using to remove the commercials from your WTV files? I ask because, if memory serves, Plex users have had various issues in the past regarding playback of WTV files. If your processing pipeline allows it, why not try remuxing into a different container, like MP4 or MKV? Personally, I record using Windows Media Center (into WTV), then use MCEBuddy/Comskip to remove commercials and remux into an MKV. It doesn’t do any video or audio conversion (other than deleting commercials), so the process is quite fast (about 5 min. for a 60 min. show). Bottom line, I’d look into another container instead of WTV.
@rwhapham said:
What are you using to remove the commercials from your WTV files? I ask because, if memory serves, Plex users have had various issues in the past regarding playback of WTV files. If your processing pipeline allows it, why not try remuxing into a different container, like MP4 or MKV? Personally, I record using Windows Media Center (into WTV), then use MCEBuddy/Comskip to remove commercials and remux into an MKV. It doesn’t do any video or audio conversion (other than deleting commercials), so the process is quite fast (about 5 min. for a 60 min. show). Bottom line, I’d look into another container instead of WTV.
VideoReDo.
I prefer not to take the quality hit to MP4…
But what is odd is that I’ve been playing back these files for several years now via Plex. They’ve worked well for me up until now, and I don’t understand why…
@psuKinger said:
@rwhapham said:
What are you using to remove the commercials from your WTV files? I ask because, if memory serves, Plex users have had various issues in the past regarding playback of WTV files. If your processing pipeline allows it, why not try remuxing into a different container, like MP4 or MKV? Personally, I record using Windows Media Center (into WTV), then use MCEBuddy/Comskip to remove commercials and remux into an MKV. It doesn’t do any video or audio conversion (other than deleting commercials), so the process is quite fast (about 5 min. for a 60 min. show). Bottom line, I’d look into another container instead of WTV.
VideoReDo.
I prefer not to take the quality hit to MP4…
But what is odd is that I’ve been playing back these files for several years now via Plex. They’ve worked well for me up until now, and I don’t understand why…
Don’t confuse a container with a codec. WTV is just a container, as is MP4 and MKV. In my case, for US OTA recordings, my WTV has 1080p MPEG2 video and 5.1 AC-3 audio. With that combination of codecs, I can simply remux (i.e., put the audio and video tracks into a new container format without any conversion loss) them into either an MP4 or MKV. At times it can be the container that causes the issue and not the actual audio/video tracks. If you want to reference what containers can hold what codecs, take a look at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_container_formats. It’s worth running a test or two to see if it’s the WTV container that’s causing your issues, or the actual audio/video inside of it.
What I don’t understand is that these exact files, in this exact (.wtv) container, worked fine for me for several years now. Only now is my PMS balking at it.
To further complicate matters, I have multiple “libraries” for my Plex Media Server. You know how you assign a “type of media” to your library (movies, TV Shows, Videos, music, etc)? Well any .wtv files that are in a “Movies” folder won’t play (anymore… used to). Any .wtv files that are in a “TV Shows” folder won’t play (anymore… used to). But a massive selection of disorganized .wtv recordings from my Windows Media Center “Recorded TV” folder all play just fine, as they are a Plex Library of media type “videos”.
Well, for anyone interested, I think I have found at least AN answer/solution to the problem… but I"m not real happy about it.
This version of Plex Media Server that I am now unfortunately running has an item for “Optimized Versions”. So where this entire collection of .wtv files played just fine in Plex up until now (previous PMS version), Plex now requires that I allow it to create an “optimized version” of the .wtv file (either an “original quality” MP4, a lower quality mobile version, an Xbox One version, a “Universal TV” version, etc) for any/every occassion…
I thought a big chunk of the beauty/awesomeness of Plex was it’s ability to look at my media, look at the device I"m trying to access it on, and spit out an “optimized version” of the file on-the-fly (“transcoding”)… I don’t want to tie up 2x+ the disc space I currently am, simply to create multiple copies of all my files.
This. really. sucks. Buyer-beware, I guess, for anyone out there with .wtv files in their Plex library… fight like he|| to try not to upgrade your PMS version if you don’t have to. I guess I’m stuck either using this crummy tool, or using AVS4You to make .mp4 copies of ALL my .wtv media… which is going to take a loooong time. The worst part about this all is that it’s unnecessary. This stuff all plays. Plex can do this. I know it can, it did it for me for over 3 years now.
I can’t speak for why you are having the issues that you are. But if you have decided upon the route of converting your WTV files, I would highly suggest taking a look at MCEBuddy (mcebuddy2x.com) to simply remux them into MP4 containers instead of doing any video conversion. My Plex server runs on an i7-4770 and can take a 60 minute WTV, strip commercials, and output as MKV (MP4 would be just as easy) in 5 minutes. If your WTV files already have the commercials removed, then I imagine it would take MUCH less time per file. Again, it’s worth a look.
One final update to all of this, I ultimately found an even better solution than manually converting all my .wtv files to .mp4 (or anything else).
I manually rolled by my Plex Media Server version to some version of 0.9.16.6.xxx by:
- Uninstalling Plex Media Server using Control Panel’s add/remove programs
- Navigating to subfolders Users - Settings - Server - Scheduled Tasks within my Plex programs folder, and finding a list of all previous versions of Plex I’ve used, including an installation file. I just double-clicked on that and reinstalled 0.9.16.6.xx
All my .wtv files work flawlessly again. As does live tv via the HDHomeRun Viewer plug-in (which was also broken).
I thought others might appreciate a how-to on rolling back what version of the server you’re using, if you’re having similar problems.
